Σχόλια 0

Το κείμενο του εγγράφου

Early 80’s a failed metallurgical industry created Smurfland,alsocalledBig-bang Schtroumpf

parkin theLorraine region

of

France,asa European leisure zone,

a

theme park, in an attempt to jumpstart theeconomy. Unemployed metallurgy workers turned “smurfmen” and then unemployed again

when thetheme park was closed.

PlaySmurflandvideo

This was a miniature universe compared to the Disneyenterprise, it bought the TV network ABC , and

at the time of this article (1996)Disney made

plans to buy the ‘hot’ section of 43nd Street in N.Y.--

“Transforming the pornographers and the prostitutes, like the factory workers in Smurfland, into extras[figurants] in their own world, metamorphosed into identical figures, museumified, disneyfied.”

TheDisney

enterprise goes beyond the imaginary. Disney, the grand initiator of the imaginary as virtualreality, is capturing all the real world to integrate it into its synthetic universe, in the form of a vast"reality show" where reality itself becomes a spectacle.

The real becomes a theme park-

the hallucination of the real in its ideal and simplified version.

Comparing Disney’s Orlando replication of L.A. Disneyland to CNN’s prototypical event of the GulfWarwhich did not take place, but rather took place in instantaneous mode. For example, Disney could revisitthe Gulf War as a worldwide show.

For Disney,Everything is possible, and everything is recyclable in the polymorphous universe ofvirtuality. Everything can be bought over. There is no reason why Disney would not take over the humangenome, which, by the way, is already being resequenced, to turn it into a genetic show.

Baudrillard

says there is no real world anymore, not even for Disney lieing in his nitrogen solution wherehas entered the virtual reality of death,

wherehe continues to colonize the world-

both the imaginary and the real-

in the spectral universe ofvirtual reality, inside which we all have become extras, figurants.

Disney

operations

are

successful in creating a universal fascination because reality itself, the worlditself, with its frenzy of cloning has already been transformedinto an interactive performance, somekind of Lunapark for ideologies, technologies, works, knowledge, death, and even destruction. All this islikely to be cloned and resurrected in a juvenile museum of Imagination or a virtual museum ofInformation.

asGuy Debord

would say:"Spectacular Inc.,"

we are no longer in a society of spectacle, which itself has become a spectacular concept. It is no longerthe contagion of spectacle that alters reality, but rather the contagion of virtuality that erases thespectacle. Disneyland still belonged to the order of the spectacle and of folklore, with its effects ofentertainment [distraction] and distanciation [distance]. Disney World and its tentacular extension is ageneralized metastasis, a cloning of the world and

of our mental universe, not in the imaginary but in aviral and virtual mode. We are no longer alienated and passive spectators but interactive extras;

we

are the meek lyophilized members of this huge "reality show." It is no longer a spectacular logic ofalienation but a spectral logic of disincarnation; no longer a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscularlogic of transfusion and transubstantiation

of all our cells; an enterprise of radical deterrence of theworld from the inside and no longer from outside, similar to the quasi-nostalgic universe of capitalistic

reality today. Being an extra

in virtual reality is no longer being an actor or a spectator. It is to be out ofthe scene,

to be obscene.

Disneyis not only interested in erasing the real by turning it into a three-dimensional virtual image withno depth, but it also seeks to erase time by synchronizing all the periods, all the cultures, in a singletraveling motion, by juxtaposing them in a single scenario. Thus, it marks the beginning of real, punctualand unidimensional time, which is also without depth. No present, no past, no future, but an immediatesynchronism of all the placesand all the periods in a single atemporal virtuality. Lapse or collapse oftime.

Baudrillard

gives 3 examples of how the dimension of the virtual doesn’t add to the other dimensionsbut erases all other dimensions:

IN THE FUTURE

-

Gladiator movies will become documentaries of the authentic Roman empire

-

The Getty Museum will be confused with a villa of the 3rd

century B.C. with everything confusedin a crush of time

-

The 1989 celebration of the French Revolution in Los Angeles confused with the real revolution

Disney has createdutopia by producing all the events, past or future, on simultaneous screens, and bymixing all the sequences as they would or will appear to a different civilization than ours.

The New World

Order is in a Disney mode. But Disney isnot alone in this mode of cannibalisticattraction. We saw Benetton with his commercial campaigns, trying to recuperate the human drama ofthe news (AIDS, Bosnia, poverty, apartheid) by transfusing reality into a New Mediatic Figuration (aplace where suffering and commiseration end in a mode of interactive resonance). The virtual takesover the real as it appears, and then replicates it without any modification,